Bruce Tate, author of the Jolt Award-winning Better, Faster, Lighter Java has an intriguing notion about the future of Java, and it's causing some agitation among Java developers. Bruce believes Java is abandoning its base, and conditions are ripe for an alternative to emerge.

In Beyond Java, Bruce chronicles the rise of the most successful language of all time, and then lays out, in painstaking detail, the compromises the founders had to make to establish success. Then, he describes the characteristics of likely successors to Java. He builds to a rapid and heady climax, presenting alternative languages and frameworks with productivity and innovation unmatched in Java. He closes with an evaluation of the most popular and important programming languages, and their future role in a world beyond Java.

If you are agree with the book's premise--that Java's reign is coming to an end--then this book will help you start to build your skills accordingly. You can download some of the frameworks discussed and learn a few new languages. This book will teach you what a new language needs to succeed, so when things do change, you'll be more prepared. And even if you think Java is here to stay, you can use the best techniques from frameworks introduced in this book to improve what you're doing in Java today.

Bruce A. Tate

Bruce Tate is a kayaker, mountain biker, father, author, and Java programmer inAustin, Texas. His five books include Better, Faster, Lighter Java and the bestselling Bitter Java (Manning). His 17 years of experience include stints at IBM, two failed startups, and his own independent consulting practice called J2Life, LLC.

This book is not about marketing Ruby. It's an essay whose goal is to forcast the key issues for application development over the next 10 years and correlate them with the current programming lanaguage landscape.

The author's conclusion, that of all the tools he examines, Ruby is the better fit, is carefully grounded in the discussion. The conclusion is one you, the reader, are free to dissagree with, but along the way you will learn something about the current state of Java, C#, Smalltalk, Python, Perl and Lisp. I knew nothing of Django and Seaside before I read the sections on Smalltalk and Python.

I find it unfair to this excellent and readable essay to brand it "Ruby marketing".

Since the inception of computer science, programming languages have come and gone at varying paces. Over the past ten years, Java has become one of the most popular programming languages on earth, but this trend will inexorably decline and eventually fade out sometimes. Quoting the author, "It's definitely not a question of if but when". Worded differently, all programming languages are born equal and make no exceptions as far as the theory of evolution is concerned.

In "Beyond Java", the message the author seeks to convey is not that Java is bad, too limited or that it will disappear next year. Instead, by dissecting a couple of established facts under his microscope, the author clearly shows that Java's reign will eventually end even though the language is still on the rise today. It's worth mentioning that this book is definitely not the result of some cheap crystal gazing exercise as the author bases his predictions and forecasts on his concrete real-world experience and on input gathered from the most famous Java gurus on the planet (Richard Monson-Haefel, Jason Hunter, James Duncan Davidson, to name a few). Aiming at a constructive attitude, the author enumerates and explains the characteristics and the features that the next leading programming language should provide according to him.

On a more concrete level, the author points out the major shortcomings of Java (static typing, general purpose semantics, etc.) that will very likely contribute to make the language become a second choice in face of its more dynamic competitors, such as Ruby. Using the later as a reference, the author explains how he managed to attain an unprecedented level of productivity when migrating a database-backed web application written in Java to the Ruby on Rails framework.

If you firmly believe that everything has a begin and an end, then you should give this book a try as it provides a good deal of useful information and much appreciated hints that will let you prepare yourself to the inexorable transition from Java to THE next language.

Though this book has showed quite good concerning points about Java but it failed to make Ruby buy me. I also found some perhaps intentional concealigs during the marketing of Ruby.

1. You will not find a single occurance of word "Java Web-Start". And Java-Applet technology is the target of punishment. You will also not find mensioning NetBeans-IDE which has way simplified things and has stopped people from go straty adopting Eclipse religion derived from it parent-religion Java. Java failed because of VB-6 type IDE should i say NetBeans-4 has not born when it should get born.

2. Contradicting his own notion that a language must do everything is falsified by his ownself by admitting Ruby is not OOP and shortcomings in every field.

3. C#.... justice was not done with it. Knowing that now system drivers are being written in C#. I remeber old days when i used to read that java is made safe. I always used to say M$ doesnt make anything safe why SUN is doing that and why i used to say in 2002 happened true by SUN saying with the realease of 1.5 said this version is more low-level than J2SE was intented. C# has done just that and won. People and this book wrongly in full totality, say that C# is clone/copy of Java. Being an OOP lanngauage doesnt automatically means that. Also i must say .Net still had Procedures and Sub-Routines architecture.

So with Java sun did was taking a LION (C/C++) broke all of it s teeth and clipped its nails in pows and the thing left was named Java.

C# its like M$ took the LION (C/C++) and has educated people and platforms (OS) how not to get bitten by it and yet take full pleasure of pleaying with it.

I believe Java and C# will compete neck to neck if NetBeans-4 type things are not evolutionised but revolutionised priodically. JBuilder and VisualCafe(late) , VisualAge(late) killed Java.